When the rain let up, Tar Valon's streets filled almost miraculously with people. Wherever they had hidden while the water fell, they crowded forth seemingly from nowhere almost as soon as it stopped. As the evening steadily darkened, lamplighters went rapidly about their chore with the oil lanterns they carried. On streets between the sometimes-whimsical buildings, dusted by fog from low-hanging clouds, hawkers still cried their wares from carts or tables. Tower Guards with watchful eyes and the Flame of Tar Valon emblazoned on their tabards stood at many corners as a reminder of the power behind this city. Sedan chairs and palanquins with ruffled drapes moved everywhere through the throngs seeking nighttime entertainment in taverns or merchants hurrying to close their shops.
Ragabash and Prancer clopped along the cobblestone behind Sildane. Ahead of her, Nordel pushed through the press while guiding the weakened Rayanne Sedai. The warder glanced pointedly over his shoulder from time to time, though he did not seem to be watching either of the two girls toiling in his wake. Ghedlyn followed behind Nordel and the Aes Sedai, her head turning back and forth compulsively as her black eyes sought to imbibe each new wonder that presented itself. She was handling "strange" and "new" surprisingly well tonight and she had not let go of saidar since they left the South Harbor. As usual, she never did smile, but her eyes and blank face seemed almost to glow. She had quieted since the incident at the river. Sildane brought up the rear leading the pair of horses and mostly trying not to trip over her own two feet.
A nest of butterflies had taken up residence in her stomach.
The Tower, huge and ominous, lit by torches from windows along its aspiring height, sometimes peaked between buildings when the clouds parted in just the right way. Who could think a three thousand year old edifice of seamless white stone would invoke such a feeling of anxiety and dread? This was where girls came to learn how to channel. As the saying went, once the Tower got its hooks into a girl, it was the Tower that would decide when it was done with her. It was also said that many girls with the ability to channel had been put out of the Tower when Aes Sedai decided they were not able to reach the shawl. Hearing about the Tower her whole life from her mother, Sildane knew about Aes Sedai, but found herself wondering now about those channeling women who were not talented enough. Though people claimed they existed, she had never heard any stories about women with the gift who did not wear the ring.
With the Tower and all it represented looming ahead, Sildane could not help wondering whether she would survive it. When Rayanne Sedai offered her the chance to learn oh-so-long-ago, she told Sildane that Sildane would one day need to make this trip and that the choice would alter her life forever. The truth struck her now more than ever before. She and her mother once visited the White Tower running an errand for an Aes Sedai who stayed at the farm, but this time she arrived equipped with her own miniscule channeling ability, knowing full well that it would be her name inscribed in the novice book and not some other girl's. And, she was painfully aware that Ghedlyn made her hard won skill look like a flickering candle next to a raging inferno. Over and over, Rayanne Sedai instructed Sildane to not compare herself to Ghedlyn and insisted that Ghedlyn was extremely abnormal. But, the younger girl was the only other channeling girl Sildane had ever known.
"This way, Sildane," Nordel called to her, turning up a side street that took them laterally across the island in the direction of the Ogier grove.
"But I thought..." Sildane responded, pointing helplessly along the street toward where she knew the main entrance to the White Tower and the surrounding compound had to be. Ragabash neighed spiritedly as if he scented home and wanted to proceed there directly.
"Not today," Nordel glanced behind them again, his eyes searching the droves of people.
"But the front entrance is that way," Sildane had no choice but to follow along.
"The front is not the only way in," the warder guided his ailing Aes Sedai ahead.
The Tower seemed to hulk over them. Sildane thought she could almost sense eyes staring down from those heights, watching the city for any hapless channeling girl who stumbled onto the island.
Ghedlyn made a noise of delight, dark eyes gleaming, as they walked past a merchant who was emptying a rain barrel into an alleyway gutter. Sildane saw her friend draw more of the power, then relax again. She seemed almost to embrace it joyously.
Sildane loved Ghedlyn dearly and treasured their time together. She loved taking the other girl to the patch of marsh near the farm where they could count frogs. She loved shooing away the buzzing bees that always set her friend to panic. She loved the small channeling games she and Ghedlyn had constantly played throughout the winter, creating weaves together as if they were playing a game of strings. She loved being an older sister to a girl who direly needed it. Despite all that, she knew only despair at ever gaining a shadow of Ghedlyn's raw talent.
"I tell you, ice spread across the harbor," a bearded man in a green coat covered with brocade patterns told another man standing in a doorway beside him, "then went away, just as quick as that!"
"You been drinking too much again..." the second man said just as Sildane exceeded earshot.
The river had fascinated Ghedlyn. During their trip on the boat, she had told Sildane repeatedly about a strange looping, spiraling, dancing pattern that ran throughout the river which she had never before seen in water otherwise. "There, see the spiral, there? The function space superposition has a time dependent collapse on a radial parameter with the Lace metric."
Sildane had not understood the wording Ghedlyn attempted to apply, "I don't know. I don't understand what you're talking about." Sildane had strained at the sloshing waves with her eyes, trying to see it the way Ghedlyn did. A fish managed better trying to breathe air.
"Why was it not there before?" Ghedlyn asked herself for the umpteenth time. "You remember the stream, remember you it? With the thirty-fourth frog. The section twenty one steps on the curve from the three rocks?"
"You mean that day you almost got stung by the bee when you started digging in the creek bed after that frog?" Sildane had prompted, hanging her arms over the gunwale.
Ghedlyn had shuddered visibly at the reminder and become momentarily introspective. After several breaths of silent contemplation, she plowed on with a single-minded determination at her previous thought, "The creek was not enough. The loop was too small. The superposition was not so strong. More water was needed to reinforce the harmony above the visible threshold. In this river, you can see it. Can you see it?"
Sildane still had not seen it. Ghedlyn had attempted to describe with empty gestures of her hands how the loop was made and how it interacted with the "Lace of Ages," though Sildane only understood a little. The prohibition against Ghedlyn directly channeling to show her discovery to Sildane seemed to frustrate the obsidian-eyed girl intensely, but her preoccupation with the river water had helped dampen that discontent. She would happily have scrawled a smattering of symbolic equations all over the boat deck in an effort to educate Sildane, if only Nordel had not prohibited it. Not that Sildane would have understood the equations any better. Sildane had learned a little in her time with Ghedlyn; she had forced herself with meager success to understand some of the arcane symbolism her friend steeped herself in, but the other girl always seemed to introduce or create something new every time Sildane thought she was beginning to understand a little of anything.
This once, what finally drove the point home for Sildane was the final weave Ghedlyn made while sitting at water line on the end of the stone jetty. Standing beside Nordel in the rain, holding the tiny globe of light and feeling the joy of saidar glowing down onto her, Sildane had gasped at the rapidity of weaving when her friend suddenly touched the source. The black-haired girl spat out a succession of no fewer than ten or twenty weaves as if they were all a single long weave, blowing back the rain and simultaneously drying off all the people and things around her. Sildane knew those weaves because she and Ghedlyn had invented them together -rather Ghedlyn invented them and then refined them so that Sildane could do them also, though she would not have recognized them had she not been paying close attention. Then, Ghedlyn turned her mind to the river. She touch the river and felt it, then spun a single, tiny, remarkable weave of Water, Wind and the smallest Fire, unlike anything Rayanne Sedai had ever shown them or that they had discovered otherwise on their own. She thought she saw the loop Ghedlyn had described to her in that weaving and saw it pull tight into the surface of the harbor. At the tiniest level, the liquid water locked together and became ice and would have frozen the entire bay solid had Ghedlyn not minutely adjusted it to unlock it again. When she let the weave go, the loop harmony in the river forgot itself a moment before breathing a sigh of relief and returning to normal.
For a split instant, Sildane thought she had seen the creator's hand at work. The weave had resounded as if Ghedlyn had flicked the side of an enormous bell and set it to thrumming minutes later.
Pulling Ragabash and Prancer clip-clopping in her wake, she dejectedly followed Nordel, Rayanne and her friend. She felt her anxiety escalating. She felt totally alone in this ancient city headed toward a confrontation with her destiny. She thought about that weave at the harbor and remembered being amazed not because Ghedlyn threw her whole strength behind it, but because the black-haired girl had applied almost no strength at all. For the same effort, Ghedlyn could have woven a globe of light half the strength of the one Sildane had been wielding the very same moment. Sildane remembered the pattern Ghedlyn wove and thought that maybe she could perform it herself if she could handle the strands of Water and Fire together. Fire gave her troubles when she tried to use it as only a tiny accent -she was simply not that deft with it. She wished she could make Ghedlyn repeat the weave a couple more times for her. Unlike her friend, she almost never managed to reproduce a weave after seeing it only once, even a weave as small and simple as the one which nearly froze all that water. She felt so... inadequate.
Would a girl training in the Tower have seen it more easily? Sildane wished she could ask Rayanne Sedai. Everything she learned about channeling, from the Aes Sedai with her visualizations and gestures and her precisely strung weaves, to the chaos and intuition that was Ghedlyn, everything left Sildane amazed. She thought she might never obtain either encyclopedic knowledge of channeling nor express the slightest genius. She felt like she meant absolutely nothing, as if she were a tiny bug on this stone street about to be trod upon by the mighty Ragabash.
Rayanne Sedai tripped on a cobblestone, jerked out of Nordel's grip and fell to her knees. The Aes Sedai's face was pallid and her eyes spun in their sockets in a hideously sub-human fashion.
"Oh that's done it," Nordel grumbled. Heedless of her weakening protests, the warder hefted the golden-haired woman and cradled her in his arms, as if she were half her actual size. "Sildane, don't dawdle, we're running out of time!"
"I thought we were going into the Tower from another side..." Sildane protested as Nordel quickened their pace. He turned up another street, this time headed directly back toward the Tower.
"Plans change," the warder responded shortly with Rayanne gathered against his chest. "We need to get to the Tower as soon as possible." Sildane could see a dribble of blood running off his wrist.
People in the crowds began to recognize the deadly grace of a warder in motion, even though the ugly, shaven-headed man was not wearing his color-shifting cloak. Murmurs began to follow them. At least some in the throng were willing to stand aside respectfully in order to give them quicker passage. Nordel glanced once over his shoulder at the crowd behind them, his gaze well above Sildane's head.
"Stand aside!" he called ahead, "Coming through!"
Sildane found herself nearly jogging to keep up, her heart thundering through her skull and neck as if it were the hoof-beats of the two horses behind her. The Tower seemed too close.
Walls of people parted from them, their faces leering in the garish streetlight. Sildane pressed close behind Nordel. Rayanne Sedai's feet brushed against people as they passed and her disheveled golden braid bounced against Nordel's leg. Sildane found herself panting with exertion, though it seemed minimal compared to what they had been through already.
She glanced around at the curved, graceful buildings and the people who now watched them. "Ghedlyn?"
Nordel pushed ahead through the quickly parting crowd cradling his Aes Sedai like a prized possession. Sildane followed him with the horses.
Ghedlyn was nowhere to be seen.
"Ghedlyn!" Sildane bleated in alarm.
Her friend was not with them.